They Are Building a Longhouse
by pyrrhicvictoly
Summary: It was always the same woman sitting here, watching the meshing water currents where the two rivers met. He had never asked for her name before.


It was always the same woman sitting here, watching the meshing water currents where the two rivers met. He had never asked for her name before.

Long, dark hair. A simple deerskin dress. She wasn't remarkable in any way except that he knew she was one of _them_, just like him. He could see it in her eyes when he approached, that this woman was much older than her appearance would suggest.

Alfred usually never got any closer. Once her head would turn to glance at him in acknowledgment, he would see the tiredness in her bearing and he would be cowed. He would chuckle awkwardly and backtrack as quickly as he could without it looking like he was fleeing. For all the exuberance at the world meetings, and for all the fearlessness he showed during war, there was something about her presence that made him feel guilty and he didn't even know why.

Still, he knew he had to face her someday because there was a hole in Alfred's chest where something ought to go. There always had been. He couldn't remember the hole being gone except when Arthur would come visit him as a child, but as soon as his brother disappeared across the sea, the strangeness would be back. If he wasn't Arthur's little brother, then who was he?

Over the years, the hole expanded. It grew so much that Arthur's presence could no longer soothe it away. He tried to fill it with glitz, glamor, and Hollywood explosions. He tried to ignore it by thinking of stars and men on the moon; he covered it with fervent patriotism. But he still couldn't even find the root of it, whatever it was supposed to be.

And that was why he was here. Because maybe, just maybe, the answer lay with her.

In two hundred and some years of existence, he hadn't once gotten up the courage to talk with her, and all he could say was a pathetic little "Hi."

"Hi," she replied.

He fled.

It wasn't very heroic.

* * *

The second attempt didn't go over much better.

Alfred tentatively made his way over to the riverside. There she sat on her flat white boulder, bare feet dangling down to brush against the grasses. He managed to scoot next to her; he managed to sit with her. And then he made a fool of himself when he opened his mouth. All his carefully planned approaches disappeared. He blanked. He said this:

"Was I the one who killed you?"

She finally responded after a tense, drawn-out silence. "No, not quite. My people split apart during your fight with your brother. They chose sides between the two of you, and I died when they raised their muskets against each other."

"Oh. So that's why I don't remember meeting you back then."

"You were just a child, so I met with your boss. By the time you were old enough to declare independence... Those were my last days."

"I'm sorry," he said.

She nodded, and the tense silence returned, wrapped in the sound of the river's rush and flow.

"I'm sorry, you know, for what my people did to your people... Um..."

The woman gave an inelegant scoff at his apology. "I already told you that you weren't the one to kill me."

"But I helped! And then there was... y'know... out west..."

"You think we are all the same, the nations you displaced?" She quirked up an eyebrow in condescension and amusement. "I have no idea what you mean by 'out west'. Those were other nations. You should take your apologies to them."

"...I was still unheroic to your people. I wanted to help them, honest!" That was the truth of it. He always wanted to help, but then the others would laugh at how young and stupid he was to butt in on their problems. Because he wasn't delicate enough; he didn't know the right way to go about doing things.

"You think that I was helpless? That I would have needed your intervention if I had lived long enough to deal with you?" The fire in her eyes challenged him to admit to the truth. He turned away to face the river while she continued to speak. "Let me tell you, child: I was a great warrior. I wiped out many nations before you were even born. My neighbors feared me and the strength of my six sons. Not once did I come crawling to apologize at the grave of the vanquished."

_That's genocide and it's wrong and heroes don't do that!_ was what he wanted to say. But he couldn't judge her for something they had all done. There had almost never been a time since Alfred's birth when he wasn't fighting some war or other, so he knew that larger nations grew out of the bones of their weaker neighbors. He'd seen it happen. Even so, Alfred wished he could pretend that he was different; that his bosses hadn't ordered the total annihilation of others just so he would have some leg room.

Alfred clamped his lips shut and stood up, bottling all the negativity inside. "Ahahaha! See ya later!" Grinning wildly, he gave her a jaunty salute and strode off. "Ahahaha!"

His hollow smile and hollow laugh cut through the dusky sky.

* * *

On the third try, they bonded.

"Why do you always look at the river?" he asked.

"There were two men who led my people in the beginning. One was named Skennenrahawi, meaning 'two river currents flowing together'. I think of him often, and I look to his river for guidance."

"That's cool. I really liked my first boss, too."

There was silence again, but for once it wasn't dead and cloying. Instead, it was alive with possibilities.

"What's your name?" Alfred asked with a shy smile. He figured he was ready to know this about his new friend.

"My name is Haudenosaunee."

"What does it mean?"

She smiled at him, then. It was small and bittersweet, the first she'd ever given him. The corners of her eyes crinkled as she took his hand and twined their fingers together. "It means 'they are building a longhouse'."

"Together?"

"Hmm?"

"Did they all build the longhouse together? All of your people, I mean. Even if they came from all different backgrounds."

"Of course!" Haudenosaunee chuckled. She took her free hand and ruffled his hair. "Of course they did. That's the whole point, isn't it?"

Alfred blushed at being treated like a little kid, but he didn't protest. "It must have been a very big longhouse," he muttered under his breath.

"Yes..." Looking back out at the river, she paused for a long while, seemingly lost in thought. When she turned to face him again, she was smiling broadly with unshed tears in the corners of her eyes. "It was big; it was very big. I wish I'd been able to spend more time with them."

"C-can't you still do that?"

_No_, she shook her head. "It was big, but not as big as yours..."

There were words missing at the end of her speech, but he heard them loud and clear. They gripped his heart and squeezed to the surface all the longing for family he had felt over the years. All the loneliness and confusion about his own identity that he had tried so hard to bury...

"Teach me!" With their hands still clasped together ever so tightly, he flung himself at her, burying his head in her shoulder and wrapping his other arm around her. "Teach me how to build the longhouse!" Alfred quietly sobbed into the crook of her neck, tears wetting her skin and soaking into her dress.

But Haudenosaunee did not respond, except to stroke his back in one last gesture of comfort.

Alfred caught himself from falling forward at her disappearance. His palms smacked into the cool stone where Haudenosaunee had been sitting. Eyes widening, he frantically looked around for her.

But she was gone.

He took off his glasses and wiped them free of tears. The wind blew down from the hills behind him. It carried her voice; her last words to him.

_Not as big as yours, my son._

* * *

**Notes:**  
1) Haudenosaunee is the name for the people of the Iroquois League/Confederacy. While the Iroquois people and the Iroquois League still exists today, I'm going with the view that the Confederacy, as a truly sovereign political and diplomatic power, no longer exists. It was split after the Revolutionary War, with many of those who sided with the British moving up into Canada. Later on, many others would move from New York to Wisconsin.

2) Re: the end of the story, I didn't intend for her to be the actual birth mother, but just the adoptive mother of his legacy. The Haudenosaunee were known to adopt/assimilate members of other tribes. They would massacre their Algonquin neighbors, but save the children to be raised as their own. The extent to which they influenced America's founding fathers is debatable, but one theory is that the framers of the Constitution borrowed heavily from them when setting down the structure of the new American government.

3) In one of my classes a few years ago, we were told to fill out a form with some information about ourselves, and the one question that stood out to me was, "Who are your people?" I couldn't answer it because I didn't know. I left it blank. It took me years to find a suitable answer to that question: the world is my people. So. This piece was written with that in mind, based on the struggles of "hyphenated Americans" searching for their sense of self. I imagine Alfred's got some issues with cultural identity if so many of his people do :)

[Also, this was completed more than 3 months ago. I was just insecure about posting it.]


End file.
